CHAPTER XXXIV

SCHOLASTICISM: SPIRIT, SCOPE, AND METHOD

The religious philosophy or theology of the Middle Ages is commonly called scholasticism, and its exponents are called the scholastics. The name applies most properly to the respectable academic thinkers. These, in the early Middle Ages, usually were monks living in monasteries, like St. Anselm, for instance, who was Abbot of Bec in Normandy before, to his sorrow, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. In the thirteenth century, however, while these respected thinkers still were monks, or rather mendicant friars, they were also university professors. Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominicans, and their friend St. Bonaventura, who became the head of the Franciscan Order, all lectured at the University of Paris, the chief university of the Middle Ages in the domain of philosophy and theology. Moreover, as the scholastics were respectable and academic, so they were usually orthodox Churchmen, good Roman Catholics. The conduct or opinions of some of them, Abaelard for example, became suspect to the Church authorities; yet Abaelard, although his book had been condemned, kept within the Church’s pale, and died a monk of Cluny. There were plenty of obdurate heretics in the Middle Ages; but their bizarre ideas, sometimes coming down from Manichaean sources, were scarcely germane to the central lines of mediaeval thought.[419]

One hears of scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology; and assuredly these mediaeval theologian-philosophers endeavoured to distinguish between the one and the other phase of the matters which occupied their minds. The distinction was intelligibly drawn and, in many treatises, doubtless affected the choice and ordering of topics. Whether it was consistently observed in the handling of those topics, is another question, which perhaps should be answered in the negative. At all events, to attempt to observe this distinction in considering the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, might sap the matter of the human interest attaching to it, to wit, that interest and validity possessed by all serious effort to know--and to be saved. These were the motives of the scholastics, whether they used their reason, or clung to revelation, or did both, as they always did.

Mediaeval methods of thinking and topics of thought are no longer in vogue. For the time, men have turned from the discussion of universals and the common unity or separate individuality of mind, and are as little concerned with transubstantiation as with the old dispute over investitures. But the scholastics were men and so are we. Our humanity is one with theirs. Men are still under the necessity of reflecting upon their own existence and the world without, and still feel the need to reach conclusions and the impulse to formulate consistently what seem to them vital propositions. Herein we are blood kin to Gerbert and Anselm, to Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, to Thomas Aquinas as well as Roger Bacon: and our highest nature is one with theirs in the intellectual fellowship of human endeavour to think out and present that which shall appease the mind. Because of this kinship with the scholastics, and the sympathy which we feel for the struggle which is the same in us and them, their intellectual endeavours, their achieved conclusions, although now appearing as but apt or necessitated phrases, may have for us the immortal interest of the eternal human.

Let us then approach mediaeval thought as man meets man, and seek in it for what may still be valid, or at least real to us, because agreeing with what we find within ourselves. Being men as well as scholars, we would win from its parchment-covered tomes those elements which if they do not represent everlasting verities, are at least symbols of the permanent necessities of the human mind. Whatever else there is in mediaeval thought, as touching us less nearly, may be considered by way of historical setting and explanation.

In different men the impulse to know bears different relationships to the rest of life. It sometimes seems self-impelled, and again palpably inspired by a motive beyond itself. In some form, however, it winds itself into every action of our mental faculties, and no province of life appears untouched by this craving of the mind. Nevertheless to know is not the whole matter; for with knowledge comes appetition or aversion, admiration or contempt, love or abhorrence; and other impulses--emotional, desiderative, loving--impel the human creature to realize its nature in states of heightened consciousness that are not palpable modes of knowing, though they may be replete with all the knowledge that the man has gained.

These ultimate cravings which we recognize in ourselves, inspired mediaeval thought. Its course, its progress, its various phases, its contents and completed systems, all represent the operation of human faculty pressing to expression and realization under the accidental or “historical” conditions of the mediaeval period. We may be sure that many kinds of human craving and corresponding faculty realized themselves in mediaeval philosophy, theology, piety and mysticism--the last a word used provisionally, until we succeed in resolving it into terms of clearer significance. And we also note that in these provinces, realization is expression. Every faculty, every energy, in man seeks to function, to realize its power in act. The sheer body--if there be sheer body--acts bodily, operates, and so makes actual its powers. But those human energies which are informed with mind, realize themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corresponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. Likewise, impelled by the desire to know, the faculties of cognition and reason realize themselves in expression; and in expression each part of rational knowledge is clarified, completed, rendered accordant with the data of observation and the laws or necessities of the mind.

Human faculties form a correlated whole; and this composite human nature seeks to act, to _function_. Thus the whole man strives to realize the fullest actuality of his being, and satisfy or express the whole of him, and not alone his reason, nor yet his emotions, or his appetites. This uttermost realization of human being--man’s _summum bonum_ or _summa necessitas_--cannot unite the incompatible within its synthesis. It must be kept a consistent ideal, a possible whole. Here the demiurge is the discriminating and constructive intelligence, which builds together the permanent and valuable elements of being, and excludes whatever cannot coexist in concord with them. Yet the intelligence does not always set its own rational activities as man’s furthest goal of realization. It may place love above reason. And, of course, its discriminating judgment will be affected by current knowledge and by dominant beliefs as to man and his destiny, the universe and God.

Manifestly whatever the thoughtful idealizing man in any period (and our attention may at once focus itself upon the Middle Ages) adjudges to belong to the final realization of his nature, will become an object of intellectual interest for him; and he will deem it a proper subject for study and meditation. The rational, spiritual, or even physical elements, which may enter and compose this, his _summum bonum_, represent those intellectual interests which may be termed ultimate, for the very reason, that they relate to what the thinker deems his beatitude. These ultimate intellectual interests possess an absolute sanction, for the lack of which whatever lies outside of them tends to adjudge itself vain.

The philosophy, theology, and the profoundly felt and reasoned piety, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made up that period’s ultimate intellectual interests. We are not concerned with other matters occupying its attention, save as they bore on man’s supreme beatitude, which was held to consist in his everlasting salvation and all that might constitute his bliss in that unending state. The elements of this blessedness were not deemed to lie altogether in rational cognition and its processes; for the conception of the soul’s beatitude was catholic; and while with some men the intellectual elements were dominant, with others salvation’s summit was attained along the paths of spiritual emotion.

Obviously, from the side of the emotions, there could come no large and lasting happiness, unless emotional desire and devotion were directed to that which might also satisfy the mind, or at all events, would not conflict with its judgment. Hence the emotional side of the ultimate mediaeval ideal was pietistic; because the mediaeval dogmatic faith regarded the emotional impulses between one human being and another as distracting, if not wicked. Such mortal impulses were so very difficult to harmonize with the eternal beatitude which consisted in the cognition and love of God. This principle was proclaimed by monks and theologians, or philosophers; it was even recognized (although not followed) in the literature which glorified the love of man and woman, but in which the lover-knight so often ends a hermit, and the convent at last receives his sinful mistress. On the other hand, reason, with its practical and speculative knowledge, is sterile when unmixed with piety and love. This is the sum of Bonaventura’s fervid arguments, and is as clearly, if more quietly, recognized by Aquinas, with whom _fides_ without _caritas_ is _informis_, formless, very far indeed from its true actuality or realization.

Thus, for the full realization of man’s highest good in everlasting salvation, the two complementary phases of the human spirit had to act and function in concord. Together they must realize themselves in such catholic expression as should exclude only the froward or evil elements, non-elements rather, of man’s nature. Both represent ultimate mediaeval interests and desires; and perhaps deep down and very intimately, even inscrutably, they may be one, even as they clearly are complementary phases of the human soul. Yet with certain natures who perhaps fail to hold the balance between them, the two phases seem to draw apart, or, at least, to evince themselves in distinct expression, and indeed in all men they are usually distinguishable.

Generally speaking, the conception of man’s divinely mediated salvation, and of the elements of human being which might be carried on, and realized in a state of everlasting beatitude, prescribed the range of ultimate intellectual interests for the Middle Ages. The same had been despotically true of the patristic period. Augustine would know God and the soul; Ambrose expressed equally emphatic views upon the vanity of all knowledge that did not contribute to an understanding of the Christian Faith. This view was held with temperamental and barbarizing narrowness by Gregory the Great. It was admitted, as of course, throughout the Carolingian period, although humanistically-minded men played with the pagan literature. Nor was it seriously disputed in the eleventh or twelfth century, when men began to delight in dialectic, and some cared for pagan literature; nor yet in the thirteenth when an increasing number were asking many things from philosophy and natural knowledge, which had but distant bearing on the soul’s salvation. One of these men was Roger Bacon, whose scientific studies were pursued with ceaseless energy. But he could also state emphatically the principle of the worthlessness of whatever does not help men to understand the divine truths by which they are saved. In Bacon’s time, the love of knowledge was enlarging its compass, while, really or nominally as the individual case might be, the criterion of relevancy to the Faith still obtained, and set the topics with which men should occupy themselves. All matters of philosophy or natural science had to relate themselves to the _summum bonum_ of salvation in order to possess ultimate human interest. Therefore, if philosophy was to preserve the strongest reason for its existence, it had to remain the handmaid of theology. Still, to be sure, the conception of man’s beatitude would become more comprehensive with the expansion and variegation of the desire for knowledge.

As the _summum bonum_ of salvation prescribed the topics of ultimate intellectual interest for the Middle Ages, so the stress which it laid upon one topic rather than another tended to direct their ordering or classification, as well as the proportion of attention devoted to each one. Likewise the form or method of presentation was controlled by the authority of the Scriptural statement of the way and means of salvation, and the well-nigh equally authoritative interpretation of the same by the beatified Fathers. Thus the nature of the _summum bonum_ and the character of its Scriptural statement and patristic exposition suggested the arrangement of topics, and set the method of their treatment in those works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which afford the most important presentations of the ultimate intellectual interests of that time. Obvious examples will be Abaelard’s _Sic et non_ and his _Theologia_, Hugo of St. Victor’s _De sacramentis_, the Lombard’s _Books of Sentences_, and the _Summa theologiae_ of Thomas Aquinas.

It will be seen in the next chapter that the arrangement of topics in these comprehensive treatises differed from what would have been evolved through the requirements of a systematic presentation of human knowledge. Aquinas sets forth the reasons why one mode of treatment is suitable to philosophy and another to sacred science, and why the latter may omit matters proper for the former, or treat them from another point of view. The supremacy of sacred science is incidentally shown by the argument. In his _Contra Gentiles_[420]